The show’s not about Walt. The show is about how Walt’s initial good intentions and development into a criminal control-freak screws up the lives of everyone around him. You need to get to know these people to get that. Without the family, it wouldn’t be the show it is.
Giancarlo Esposito (AKA Gus Fringe) was at our local comic convention. Got a photo with him. He had a fake box cutter with him and he would pretend to slice open your neck for the photo. Heck of an actor and awesome guy in real life.
Yeah he is at Fan Expo this year. So is the Governor and Michonne from Walking Dead. My wallet gonna get raped.
And yeah I never understood the point to the stories where Hanks wife kept stealing shit.
Yeah; that had no “point” whatsoever. They did something with it when Skyler confronted her, but then the problem was gone until S4, when it came back for one episode. It didn’t affect anything, really.
Well considering Hank was DEA and he had a kleptomaniac for a wife and a drug lord for a brother-in-law… I think it was foreshadowing more than anything. Hank was looking anywhere but right under his nose. Family was off limits for him for the longest time, until the epic shit scene.
he gets screen time too
Also Marie tried to steal Holly, for a good cause, so it wasn’t entirely a worthless storyline lol
Skyler having a kleptomaniac for a sister also shows how she deals with having a criminal in the family. Yeah, Walt’s doings are WAY WAY WAY more serious, but by the time that’s happened she’s already used to not going to the police. It helps give the viewers another bit of reasoning for what she does when she finds out about Walt.
Also, Skyler’s sister stealing some stuff is a Big Deal and a stress factor for her, and in the meantime Walt is getting deeper and deeper into the drug trade. So you get the whole “ooh man what’s she gonna think when she finds out about Walt?” thing. Not to mention that once the realization hits her, she realizes she’s in a family where EVERYONE has a skeleton in their closet. It all adds to her building ulcer.
Walt’s not really a drug dealer, he’s more just a drug cook. He sucks at the dealing part really. I feel like people try to make him sound more badass than he actually was in the show. That’s kind of why the series finale felt a little out of character to me. He’s not the badass drug cartel kingpin who violently kills everyone who opposes him. Heck he never even gets on Krazy 8’s level imo. He’s just a guy that cooks drugs and then desperately deals with the other elements haphazardly as they come up.
It’s a good show though, I finished it some weeks back. I think I wound up watching the entire thing over the period of about 1 week. The ending was about as good as you can expect from American television. This is probably the best show in American TV since maybe Seinfeld.
walt became the badass drug dealer that kills people.
sure at first he was just a cook. then just being a cook wasn’t enough. he lost his fucking mind.
Walt starts out with good intentions through (at best) morally ambiguous means. Then throughout the series he gradually descends deeper and deeper into evil-badassedness, through both skill, extensive planning and incredible amounts of luck.
He’s very much not a hands-on guy, and that makes it all the heavier when he does personally take care of something. But just because he has other people do the dirtier work for him doesn’t make him any less of a killer. Everything he does except for one single hands-on kill and one single command -
Spoiler
- that being Mike and his (thankfully not obeyed) command to kill Jesse after Hank’s death -
- he does because he feels it’s necessary. Though throughout the series, human lives outside of his tight family circle (and that includes a certain other guy) matter less and less to him, so these death sentences become less and less hard for him to say.
The finale is just the culmination of everything he’s gone through. The only real criticism I’ve seen is that things seem to go his way too much and get wrapped up too neatly, but that’s only true from his perspective:
[details=Spoiler]When Walt dies, he dies happy, thinking that everything’s fixed. But he only THINKS that. There’s no guarantee that his former partners won’t decide to go to the police and take up some sort of witness protection thing.
There’s no guarantee that his son will accept the donations from them: Knowing that his dad tried to pull that stunt, he’d be seriously suspicious of anything like that.
Jesse gets the NEED FOR SPEED and drives off, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll make it away, and what then? He’s seriously, seriously damaged. Small chances of him having a good life after this.
Marie and Skyler are left with two dead husbands, all thanks to Walt. And considering everything that went down, even though Walt pulled off (in one of the most touching scenes of the series) making her seem like an unwilling hostage-participant in all this, Skyler isn’t going to have the police or the tax investigators out of her hair for a long while.
Walt minimized the damage as much as he could, but his rampage through the whole series has left his whole family in ruins, no matter how much he did to try to fix it.[/details]
If you compare Walt to Don Eludio (or any of the Dons actually), Mike, Gus, even Declan or all the way back to Tuco, Walt never really builds an empire like those guys and he is far more reactionary and fragile. His death toll isn’t really that high nor is he as safe and powerful as you’d expect a drug lord to be. It’s all too easy to threaten and control him, and he needs tremendous amounts of luck to ever even get a kill on someone that is gunning for him.
At the end he shoots down all of Uncle Jack’s gang with that machine gun through the wall. That is not his MO throughout the series, and it’s again a reaction to someone else and then a lot of luck. But even the actors and the creator have said it was a departure from the rest of the series.
If you want to see someone ascend to create a criminal empire, a game like GTAIV is going to do a better job. Breaking Bad is really more about Walt’s struggles with his life and yes his flaws. It’s less about becoming a drug lord.
I disagree. I’m not saying Walt isn’t a really bad guy, but he clearly doesn’t have the stomach to kill someone in cold blood. When he does kill someone himself, its usually a panicked, adrenaline driven do or die action. The rest of the time its ordering hits or generally distancing himself from the violence.
And Walt is a hands on guy for just about everything else. It’s hard to imagine a meth cook who has ascended to distributing millions of dollars worth of drugs would still be interested in the grind of making the meth themselves (post Gus). Tony Soprano wouldn’t be on the front lines like that (or even be involved in selling drugs for that matter).
Well, to be fair, not only is cooking in Walt’s character (pride in his formula; only certain people are allowed it), but he was broke when he started up again after Gus.
But becoming a drug lord is pretty much what Walt wanted. He stayed in the game because he was the best cook. But of course his ego prevents him from really working under somebody, so he has to be the cook+boss. If finance was his only struggle, he’d be working for Gus and be fine. Yes, he did give it up right before Hank found out, but we really don’t know how long that would have lasted. He’s given it up/gone back to cooking multiple times throughout the series. He’s had so many outs from making meth, but he continued to stay in the game.
He may not be the most ruthless killer, but he’s still a killer and knows people are dying over his product.
BTW, he watched Jesse’s girl OD. I know he didn’t actively kill her, but watching her suffer and die like that when he could help is still very cold blooded.
Only part that went nowhere was the pink teddy bear, cant believe some ppl paid 20k for the auction of it.
I guess it depends on what a drug lord is.
Does Walt control a sizable network of persons involved in the trade of drugs and is he protected by several layers of underlings making him difficult to catch?
lol…not really. He maybe controlled Jesse and Saul, but Jesse just quits on him and Saul wants to quit but gets intimidated until it’s over all the way at the end. Still, Jesse and Saul aren’t really a sizable network of persons.
As for the killings, you wrote yourself he doesn’t actively kill her. I’m not even sure how he’s supposed to know she’s dying. If heroine is that lethal I don’t get why anybody does it, and I assume lots of people must just die from it so she would have died anyway. It didn’t help she had just threatened him and blackmailed him, and was going to do it again whenever she wanted. Walt is probably lucky she did die, because otherwise his run would be over right there since he wouldn’t have had the balls to kill her himself or order her death (not that Jesse would do it anyway).
Saul was more badass than Walt and Jesse, he wanted them to kill off Badger all the way at the beginning.
And of course, most of the actual drug lords in the show will kill indiscriminately. They kill if someone even shows up that might make drugs, even if they’re not dealing those drugs, such as Don Eludio and Hector Salamenca killing Gus’s partner. The twins killed pretty much everything that moved. Krazy 8 wanted to kill Walt just because he cooked meth that was good, all the way at the beginning. The list goes on and on, Tuco and Mike are high up on that list of killers too.
But Jesse and Walt? lol they can’t kill, they suck at it.
It’s like those old S-Kill articles about scrubs making up all these rules for why they can’t do something. Walt and Jesse were total drug business scrubs. They refuse to kill anybody and get a real network going. It’s like a scrub going “well he threw me so now I can get my throw back” against say Gus. The show was about these two bungling white guys playing the drug business, which happened to be full of Mexican, Hispanic and Black drug lords. The only white drug “lords” were Walt (which I think is a stretch) and Jack’s gang, who are always reviled as white supremacists. But look at all those minorities, quick to kill and deal those drugs, even Lydia the minority woman peddling meth all the way in Europe.
As said, that goes for all but two cases:
[details=Spoiler]When he kills Mike, that’s not a panicked reaction. That’s Walt finally getting angry enough to pick up a gun and shoot someone dead.
He doesn’t do it out of necessity. He does it because Mike disobeys him, and that pisses him the fuck off. Watch the way he acts when he does it. It’s not panic. It’s cold anger.
And when he orders Jesse’s death, it’s simple vengeance. He blames Jesse for setting it all in motion. Nothing panicky or do-or-die about that. Once more he’s pissed off.[/details]
Walt watching Jane die was probably the only time in the series I was truly disappointed with him. But gotdamn, the scene still made sense.
On Walt, if people directly affected Jesse (pre-snitch) or himself, consider yourself dead lol. Remember Gus’s guys he ran over/shot? Or Gus’s goons watching over Jesse in Face Off? Walt can kill people directly when it interferes with his “empire business,” it just has to be within the bromance perimeters